President Trump dismissed criticism of Michelle Obama on Friday, telling press at the White House that she was just paid to write a book.
“I haven’t seen it,” he said. “I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book.”
Trump appears to have responded to Michelle Obama’s assertion in her new book out next week, that she could “never forgive” him for his birther attacks on her husband.
“Oh, Michelle Obama said that?” said Trump. “They always insist that you come up with controversial. Well I’ll give you a little controversy back. I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly. It was depleted. Everything was old and tired.”
Trump said President Obama’s negligence of the armed forced was forcing him to spend “tremendous amounts” of money now.
Michelle Obama has largely avoided the spotlight since leaving the White House, but she granted a rare interview with “Good Morning America” on Friday to tease her new memoir “Becoming.”
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?” she wrote, referring to Trump’s birther claims against her husband. “Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”
Before he became president, Trump spent years falsely accusing President Obama of having secretly been born in Kenya. He became the loudest voice of the “birther” conspiracy and beginning in 2011 frequently appeared on “Fox & Friends” to promote the idea — with little pushback from the show’s hosts.
“Because the rhetoric, because of the mistruths, because of the lies that he was saying about the birther situation that was not true, she’s a Momma bear,” said GMA co-host Robin Roberts Friday. “Michelle Obama is a momma bear when it comes to her family.”